Jo Maitland: Hello, and welcome to Cloud Cover TV, our weekly show on all the juiciest news in the cloud computing market. I am Jo Maitland, here in San Francisco, and this week I have Marten Mickos with me, he is the CEO and Founder of Eucalyptus. Welcome to the show, Marten.

Marten Mickos: Thank you, Jo. Happy to be here.

Jo Maitland: Just to kick off this quick interview, Eucalyptus makes software that basically lets companies roll their own infrastructures of service in-house. One of the interesting features of it is that it seamlessly hooks up without modifying any code to the Amazon cloud, to AWS. I am curious, given the crazy news this week of the outage, it was three, four days, still, customers this week are having some problems with services running on AWS, whether that feature, that ability to seamlessly connect and move workloads to the Amazon Cloud is still a feature people are going to be interested in?

Marten Mickos: I definitely think so. Eucalyptus was designed as a very powerful cloud software platform, as an engine, you could say. Then our founders decided, I was not the founder, I joined a year ago, but the founders, the six PHDs decided to build on top of it the same API as AWS uses, the same API as Amazon has. This was to build a complement, an on-premise complement to what they have on the public site, so if you run something on AWS, you can move it over to the on-premise side, on Eucalyptus. If you develop on Eucalyptus, you can go live on Amazon, you can move workloads back and forth, and you can build hybrid solutions on top of them because the API is exactly the same, it is the same platform for the developers.

Last week, Amazon had this famous outage which really harmed some of the web companies who were using AWS and were using it based on just one region. I would say, in the grand scheme of things, we shouldn’t be surprised that things that human beings create sometimes break down, specifically, when you have such a massive service as Amazon. Even if you have just one defect in a million, one defect in a billion, or even in 10 billion, you quickly get up to 10 billion, in terms of volume, and you will have those outages. It was very bad for some of the companies, and I think there are lots of things for Amazon to learn and do better next time. I also think that it will not stop the growth of cloud computing, I do not think it will harm Amazon's business in the long run.

Jo Maitland: Do you think there is something wrong with the design principles of their cloud, or is this just a case of large numbers and so much scale, therefore, there’s aggregated risk because it is just such a big platform?

Marten Mickos: I think they have show that the concepts they have chosen and the designs are very sound and very robust, but something was wrong in the implementation, because the malfunction, the outage actually spread beyond availability zones, which they are not supposed to do, so something went wrong there. Some people say that the biggest mistake here was that Amazon did not communicate early enough and directly enough about what was happening, and that is actually how they could have avoided some of the problems, by just letting their customers know what was happening.

Jo Maitland: Why are they not doing that? They have been criticized for this in the past, and their communication is still radio silent on this one.

Marten Mickos: I don't know. I think they have built a fantastic cloud. I think they are an amazing online book store, and I read books on the Kindle every day, so I really admire the company. No company is perfect, and maybe this is an area in which they would want to develop.

Jo Maitland: There is also an option to build across multiple clouds. Is that something you that can do from the Eucalyptus software? Could I work with Rackspace? Could I work with the other public clouds, as well as AWS, from your internal software or . . .

Marten Mickos: You certain can, in terms of the design, we built a product that can support any cloud API we would like to support. Today, Amazon's API is 60% of the market, or more, so we have chosen to focus on that, because that is where all the action is. Unfortunately, we have not seen many other clouds yet really grow into prominence in this market, so that is why, just for business reasons, we are squarely focused on being compatible with Amazon applications and we do that, not just so that you can move applications, but also so that the skill level you achieve on one is useful on the other. Say you read a book about Amazon's Cloud, you have essentially read a book about Eucalyptus. Say you develop a tool that runs on Amazon, it will run on Eucalyptus. A tool that is built for Eucalyptus will function on Amazon. It’s a way of lowering the hurdle of getting going with the cloud, by using the de facto standard, which today is API.

Jo Maitland: Right. Although it does not have you spread your risk across multiple clouds.

Marten Mickos: That is true, but you can establish a Eucalyptus on-premise cloud, where you move, that you have as a backup cloud, if you like. I am sure that in the next few years we will see other public clouds with the same API, then you will be able to move workloads and have them as backup for each other. Sometimes we say that it isn’t a cloud if it has strict boundaries, clouds need to be open to interaction and clouds bump into each other; that is the analogy of the cloud. It is very malleable.

Jo Maitland: In terms of private clouds and people running private clouds on Eucalyptus software, are we talking about 50 companies, 100, 300? Where are we in the adoption?

Marten Mickos: Every time people start using Eucalyptus, unless you stop it from doing it, it will phone home and check for new images. We have measured 25,000 such starts; it means that, in the world, at least 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds have started up. Some, of course, are experimental clouds and short-lived, but many of them are production clouds all over the world. Specifically, we see attraction with web properties, typically big brand owners who operate web applications or mobile applications, we see a lot of government agencies, we see academic institutions, universities, and we see just start-ups and enthusiasts who love cloud technology and would love to roll their own, so they download Eucalyptus and they install it. You can install it on even a single laptop, it is not really a big cloud yet, but you can do it. You can have 5 servers, 50 servers, 500, 5000.

Jo Maitland: How many of those are moving workloads to AWS?

Marten Mickos: I wish I knew.

Jo Maitland: 5%?

Marten Mickos: You know this is open source software, so they are under no obligation to tell us what they are doing. I would say there is a reasonably good overlap between Eucalyptus users and Amazon users.

Jo Maitland: I am curious. From what I have read and the CIOs that I have talked to that are building private clouds or even IT directors that are moving in that direction, they have this sort of notion of, "OK. We are just going to spin up a private cloud over here just to get the CEO or the CIO off our back. We can say we got one." It was a bit like the ‘90s; ‘Yes, we got the internet.’ They are spinning up this silo now, and adding yet another silo of IT infrastructure that is deployed and managed differently than everything else that they have. Is that ultimately not just adding to the complexity and the cost of everything, when the whole goal of cloud is actually to try and reduce the cost and reduce complexity?

Marten Mickos: I think the opposite. In the long term it will reduce complexity because that little cloud installation will expand, they will see the benefits of it, and they will expand it into more and more areas of their data center. I do think it is smart of CIOs to start small and test it out, because not only is it new software that you need to understand, it is also a new way of dealing with software, so managing your data resources and your IT resources is different. More than before, you need to have the system admins work together with the application developers, traditionally they have been silo’d, but with cloud computing they are coming more together and they work together.

Jo Maitland: That seems to be one of the big barriers too, the political boundaries inside of companies.

Marten Mickos: It is always the barrier. When you come with fantastic new technology and you can demonstrate amazing cost savings or increases in utilization, it still is the human being who is the slowest moving part in the equation. People have built their own careers, they have certified themselves for certain technologies, they are just not interested in bringing in a new one, until you find those pioneering spirits who will do it, no matter what. Those are exactly the small clouds that you talked about.

Many times when you talk about the cloud, we think about something absolutely massive like Amazon's cloud. In reality, most clouds are very small experimental clouds, today, with tens or hundreds of servers maximum. That is where we have enormous penetration with Eucalyptus, in companies, governments, and start-ups.

Jo Maitland: Equally, though, that means that they could just switch these small clouds off. I am wondering what that means for the survival of your company and how long you are going to have to be in the game for. It seems like this shift in IT, people compare it to the shift towards client server and we are talking years, and years, and years. How do you manage that?

Marten Mickos: That’s the good part here. Big shifts always take many, many years to happen, and you have to have the endurance and the patience to wait it out. It completely follows the technology adoption lifecycle that Geoff Moore described in 'Crossing the Chasm' in the ‘80s. I think he wrote the book in the ‘80s, and it is completely true today. It will take time, but we have a huge update for our technology among the pioneers. At the same time, the world has grown so much, it is not just the US and Europe anymore. It is Brazil, Russia, India, and China; massive markets that we are working with.

For instance, Eucalyptus, our first office and sales office outside of the US was in China; that is where we went. We felt it was the most attractive market for us. Even if you could argue that it will take time, and how do you know that they do not close those and shut down the cloud? Sure, many will do that, but there are even more who are not doing it; who are really moving forward and seeing the strategic benefit of the cloud.

Jo Maitland: Marten, thank you for being on the show.

Marten Mickos: Thank you, Jo.

Jo Maitland: This has been Cloud Cover TV. Thank you for watching, and tune in next week for more insider news and interviews in the cloud computing market.

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